THE THEATR.E
PAST IMPER.FECT
A Tennessee Williams resurrection, and Bruce Norris on Broadway.
BY JOHN LAHR.
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"In Masks Outrageous andAustere" is by Williams, six collaborators, and a computer.
T et's imagine for a minute that you are
L a director and you're unhappy with
one of Tennessee Williams's great plays.
If you went to one of the archives where
reams of his drafts, notes, and outtakes
are housed, you would find perfectly
readable scenes in which, for instance, at
the end of "A Streetcar Named Desire,"
Stanley beds Blanche, who promises to
bear him a son, or Laura and Jim, the
Gentleman Caller in "The Glass Me-
nagerie," go out on a date after dinner
while Tom and Amanda wash up. These
scenes are the author's discarded experi-
ments, not meant for production or pub-
lication. To pass off such finger exercises
as part of Williams's meaning, to wran-
gle them into those plays, would be ludi-
crous and foolliardy, which is the prob-
lem with "In Masks Outrageous and
Austere" (directed by David Schweizer,
at the Culture Project). The show is
billed as the "world première ofT ennes-
76 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 30, 2012
see Williams's final full-length play." It is
not his play; it is yet another regrettable
co-authorship-a compilation of six
different versions by six well-meaning
collaborators and a computer program,
Juxta, which conducted a "forensic anal-
ysis" of the text. To borrow a line from
the script, "My God, if this were theatre,
1'd think it a metaphor for the idiocy of
. "
eXIstence.
A quasi-religious aura hovers over
the whole earnest enterprise, which
seems to me the theatrical equivalent of
trying to clone Christ from shreds of the
Shroud of Turin. Williams worked on
the play between 1979 and 1983; a Xe-
roxed copy of his first draft, titled "Tent
Worms," is displayed in the lobby of the
theatre, like a Gnostic gospel. Nearby, a
tabernacle of sorts has been erected: vis-
itors are encouraged to wander through
an alcove containing Williams's writing
desk and his Royal portable typewriter,
and to watch a television monitor broad-
casting images from Williams's late
plays, his campy 1970 TV interview
with David Frost, and a singer belting
out, "I got those Tennessee Wil-
liams/Southern decadence blues." The
song lingers long after the memory of
the play has faded.
"Once the heart is thoroughly insu-
lated, it's also dead," Williams wrote to
Kenneth Tynan in 1955. "My problem is
to live with it, and to keep it alive." Dur-
ing the next quarter century of his cre-
ative life, he kept his heart open by
flagellating it and reporting on its de-
struction. As these winded and arid
figments of his imagination testify, by
the time Williams started to work on "In
Masks Outrageous"-which has been set
six months after his death, in February,
1983-the game was up. "I am what you
see, exhausted: but unashamed of what I
have done without choice," says Wil-
liams's mouthpiece, Babe (played by the
lacklustre Shirley Knight), a billionaire
balabusta, who is being held, with her bi-
sexual third husband, by a group of sin-
ister security guards, who patrol the pe-
rimeter of an undisclosed location. The
play s last words, spoken by Babe, are its
most important. "The performance is
over," she says, raising her arms, "like
wings, as the scene dims out." The mo-
ment reads as a kind of liberation for
both character and creator. Williams,
who had strained for more than forty
years to be great, couldn't be "Tennessee
Williams" anymore. "The masked ball is
over, the disguise is dropped off, and
under the disguise was what?" Babe asks
herself, adding, "Beneath it was simply
animal survival, and the brutality of the
unconscious." By the end of his career,
Williams, cut off from friends and com-
munity, had retreated so far that he'd lost
his bearings. 'Where are we?" "Find out
where I am?" "Here is where?" the char-
(/)
acters bleat throughout the evening, ð
trapped, like their author, in an unfath-
omable emptiness.
>-
Schweizer wraps this small, dishev-
C<::
elled literary effort in a big, elegant pack- 9
age and decorates it with the sparkle of
seasoned theatrical names like Knight,
and Austin Pendleton and Buck Henry,
who make cameo appearances in video
projections as Babe's doctor and as the
chairman of the board of her late hus-
<(
band's company. The Plexiglas surround ð